The Speed of Understanding (142)

Welcome back to Artificial Insights, your irregular dispatch from the near future.There’s a recurring meme on Twitter that to stay on top of AI you basically have to be unemployed.And it’s not wrong about the firehose. Not a week goes by without some revolutionary model or paper, and the trillions being poured into the labs guarantee it keeps coming for the foreseeable future. But I’ve started to think the meme gets the diagnosis backwards. The people who actually keep up aren’t the ones reading the most. They’re the ones building the most. Keeping up with AI is a building problem, not a consumption one.That’s the shortcut nobody puts on a slide: you don’t come to understand these tools by watching them scroll past, you understand them by pointing them at something you actually care about. Everything I know about where the frontier really is, I learned by trying to make it do something for me.I’ve written before about how my own efforts mostly come down to fixing my “software-shaped…